Monday, May 27, 2019

The 1970s produced some outstanding instances of work with larger
ensembles, employing the resources of saxophonist and bandleader Toshiyuki
Miyama and his New Herd Orchestra. Their Four Jazz Compositions - Based on Japanese Classical Themes
(Toshiba, 1970) is a seamless blend of two musical cultures, masterfully
orchestrated. Miyama invited pianist Masahiko Sato and percussionist
Masahiko Togashi to work with the New Herd, producing two classic albums
fashioned with a meticulous ear for distinctive combinations. Sato’s Canto of Libra (Columbia, 1970) and Togashi’s Canto of Aries (Columbia, 1971) mix the composed and improvised in
fresh imaginings of single and massed instrumental voices, owing as much to
the translucent textures of Debussy and Stravinsky’s orchestral works as
they do to the vibrancy of big band jazz.

Togashi’s Spiritual Nature (East Wind, 1975) is a suite for nine
musicians playing an array of instruments including cello, flutes,
saxophones, piano, celeste, marimba and glockenspiel, creating a
deliciously exotic, multi-coloured sound world, in the minds of some
depicting Japanese landscapes. Just as original is Sato and the New Herd’s Nayutageno (Columbia, 1976), a mural of highly charged solo
activity set against static blocks of orchestral sound. In some episodes
they seem to exist in different timeframes. El Al (Union, 1979)
was written for the New Herd by Takashi Kako, who had graduated from the
Paris Conservatoire with the Prix de Composition in 1976, and features
himself (piano), Akira Sakata (alto sax and clarinet) and Togashi amongst
swirling woodwind and rasping horns.

At the end of the decade Togashi and his Improvisation Jazz Orchestra
produced Al-Alaph (Paddle Wheel, 1980), conducted by Sato, who
also plays piano and electric piano, and using three percussionists. It’s a
75-minute opus of contrasting sections unified by a theme that recurs in
various guises, like an idée fixe – chanted by the musicians at
the opening over an elaborate drum beat, hauntingly extended by the
saxophones in ‘Winds’, sounded out over the hubbub of ‘Streets’, and
forming a backdrop of shifting chords on ‘Lonely’. Elements of the theme
are also used as the basis for improvised solos. The same forces
subsequently recorded Follow the Dream (Paddle Wheel, 1985), this
time with Masayuki Takayanagi on guitar, another diverse collection lasting
almost 90 minutes, ranging from the exquisitely crafted to boisterous
blowouts. All these albums stand comparison with Mingus, Gil Evans and the
best of the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra and Globe Unity for their ingenious
synthesis of scored and improvised music, rhythmic vitality and novel
voicings.

Given how brightly the fires burned in the 1970s, inevitably, the
temperature cooled somewhat in the 1980s and beyond. There was more concord
than discord with the ambit of the music widening further as new forms and
styles were incorporated. Some musicians simply moved beyond genre. As so
often, much of this had been prefigured by Sato. He composed, conducted and
arranged the album Amalgamation (Liberty, 1971). Part 1 crosscuts
between a brass ensemble, string quartet, far-out rock band, funky Hammond
organ and the voice of Adolf Hitler in a rudimentary collage that sounds
somewhere between Frank Zappa and John Zorn. Part 2 seeks to integrate by
layering traditional Japanese music with a free jazz dialogue between
Mototeru Takagi (reeds) and Toyozumi Yoshisaburo (drums), chants and
churchy organ, and ethereal, wordless vocals.

In a different direction, the piano duo album Exchange (Victor,
1979) by Haruna Miyake and Yosuke Yamashita is a prismatic display that
comes directly from the sound of contemporary classical piano music; one of
the tracks is even called ‘Schoenberg’. The piece “Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony’ is an ambitious improvisation around the ‘Ode to Joy’ and the
theme from the slow movement of the symphony, recast in continually
changing contexts, with the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony thrown in
for good measure. This is more than mere hybridisation however, and makes a
surrealistic sense. Yamashita and Togashi, previously regarded as quite
different strains of the free jazz scene, performed as a duo on Kizashi (Next Wave, 1980): a counterpoint of melodic lines on both
drums and piano, now dancing rather than boxing. Yamashita gradually turned
his virtuoso gifts to shedding new light on a broader repertoire and
reimagining the history of jazz piano, with affection not irony, in
combinations that in their own way are as creative as his earlier work. His Bolero (Enja, 1986) with Hozan Yamamoto, one of the leading
figures in shakuhachi (bamboo flute) music, is another fascinating merger
of East and West.

Togashi was also at home in contemporary music. The composer and pianist
Yuji Takahashi had studied in Paris with Xenakis and recorded the complete
Sonatas and Interludes of John Cage. In 1976 he and Togashi played together
on the album Twilight (Denon, 1977) and later began to perform
publicly as an improvising duo (Duo Live 1988 (Masahiko Togashi
Archives, 2014)). They can also be heard on Hall Egg Farm (Egg
Farm, 2009) with Steve Lacy. Increasing his musical horizons even further,
in 1993 Sato took part in the celebrations of the 850th
anniversary of the Buddhist teacher Kakuban at the Bodokan, performing and
conducting his own composition for a small orchestra comprised mainly of
free jazz musicians, augmented by a chorus of one thousand monks using
random vocalisations and tunings. No recording was made of the microtonal
monks, and probably none could do them justice.

The Eastasia Orchestra was a unit led by alto saxophonist Yoshiaki
Fujikawa, a smorgasbord of Asian roots music – traditional Indian and
Chinese melodies, gamelan rhythms, Japanese oiwake folk sounds –
wrapped up in a bouncy big band with free jazz blowing. Conducted by
Fujikawa, and full of surprises, he would pick out soloists, duos and trios
on the spot to liven up the arrangements. Their 1984 tour of Europe was a
huge success, culminating in a concert at the Volksbühne (“People’s
Theatre”) in East Berlin before an audience of three thousand: Jazzbühne Berlin '84 (Repertoire, 1991). The following day,
enthusiastic customs officials who’d heard the performance waived them
through passport control without the need for a baggage check.

Such exercises in cross-pollination led Soejima to write, in 1990:

“Because jazz is a living thing, if you cram it into a jar and shut the
lid, it dries up and dies. So waking up to other types of improvised music,
combining them with jazz, genetically modifying them to become new types of
music is a positive development…What is called “free jazz” may be thought
of as something between death and reincarnation.”

Which might be as good a definition as you’ll find.

One particularly moving story is that of the double bass player Motoharu
Yoshizawa, who was more interested in understanding himself and those about
him than the technicalities of music making, playing solo but frequently
with others for extra stimulus. Duo 1969.10.9 (PSF, 1994) with
Mototeru Takagi, which contains an impassioned rendering of Ornette’s
‘Lonely Woman’, <Nord> Duo '75 (ALW, 1981) with Kaoru Abe,
Two Chaps
(Chap Chap, 2015) with Evan Parker, and
Oh My, Those Boys!
(NoBusiness, 2018) with fellow bassist Barre Phillips are all of the
highest quality. Suffering from liver problems, in the last year of his
life he collaborated with the Gyaatees, a group of monks with learning
disabilities. As he told Soejima on the telephone:

“They are all really great. It may be hard to get them coordinated for
sutra chanting, but each of them sings with an absolutely pure heart. This
is real improvising.”

Knowing the end was near, Yoshizawa organised a “Memorial Service for the
Living Motoharu Yoshizawa” to take place on September 15, 1998, to which
the Gyaatees were invited. It was rumoured it would be his last
performance, but he passed three days beforehand and the concert became a
true memorial.

Soejima’s narrative ends as one century turns into the next, and the
emergence of figures such as guitarist Otomo Yoshihide and pianist and band
leader Satoko Fujii. The story of free jazz in Japan doesn’t end with the
close of the twentieth century, but his book is a salutary reminder of why
music matters and the importance it can have in the lives of performers and
listeners alike. Free jazz is a universal language that has many dialects,
some with roots in national cultures. Innovation and originality are
attempts to find a vocabulary for a language yet to be formulated in
musical experience. Bearing that in mind, there are certain characteristics
and concerns within the music discussed over the last three days – by no
means unique or generic, and which admit of degrees – which can be
considered distinctive of the Japanese free jazz parlance developed during
this period. They are features that range from tangible timbres (how stuff
sounds) to more abstract considerations, alternative ways to experience and
think about music.

A great deal of the music exhibits a sensitivity to space and proportion –
what in Japan is called “ma” – a respect for the balancing attributes of
positive and negative space, which can be found everywhere from woodprints
and ink wash paintings to garden design and shakuhachi music. There’s a
heightening of spatial depth and a feeling for the texture of time passing
(in the West, something similar can be found in certain black and white
photography and film). Sounds are given room to breathe according to their
own distinct resonances, a peculiarly sensual engagement where the subject
is sonority and how it can be handled according to an internal,
self-engendered logic that has regard to the power of silence as well as
the clashes that can activate that space. The result is musical development
that is more environmental than structural, and where sound can have the
presence of colour, an almost synesthesthetic experience. Writing about the
“transcendental ambient creations” of Takayanagi’s solo
Action Direct
, Soejima says:

“Sound is supposed to be vibration, but when converted to particles and
waves, tone changes to colour and a huge kaleidoscopic space is created. It
changes into physical matter, each tone heavy and dense.”

The integration of traditional instruments and ancient ways of thinking are
also relevant, perhaps echoing Japanese perspectives on our relationship to
history – not reproducing the past but using it to liberate the present and
produce something grounded but new, more concerned with cyclical continuity
than an ascending line of progress that casts off what went before. On Essence by Togashi's Guild for Human Music (Denon, 1977) cello,
flute and saxophones are delicately woven over traditional rhythmic
patterns played on marimba and assorted percussion. Sato and the New Herd’s Yamataifu (Express, 1972) is an imaginatively scored portrait of
the Yamataikoku legend, the land where Japan began, in which jazzy accents
combine with folk-like tunes and avant-garde textures. Sato manipulates the
sound of his piano using live electronics in a way that evokes antique
instruments and yet at the same time sounds completely modern.

Buddhist thought provides the general framework for his three solo piano
albums recorded in January, March and April 1976, considered by Soejima to
be a pinnacle of 1970s free jazz in Japan: Multi-Spheroid, Yǔn (“Acceptance”) and Kwan-Ji-Zai, all on the Denon
label – according to Soejima, “like a three-sided mirror reflecting Sato’s
own consciousness”. The album Kwan-Ji-Zai, named after the Goddess
of mercy, was improvised while Sato was looking at the art of calligrapher
Katsuhiko Sato, playing “just in the same way as you cast your shadow”. At
Moers in 1982, he performed with live calligraphy as inspiration and
Japanese dancer Tadashi Endo responding to the music, released (audio only)
as Apostrophe (Crown, 1993).

There are times when the pentatonic scales of Japanese music lend a
distinctive flavour, something Soejima identifies as a distinguishing
feature when comparing Yamashita’s playing with the more blues-based chords
of Cecil Taylor. There can also be a noticeably different sense of rhythm
and how it functions, possibly influenced by taiko drumming. Even
when using a standard drumkit it’s a sound that can stress skin rather than
stick, with equal weight given to strong and weak beats and less emphasis
on rhythmic subdivisions. Pulse is a matter of pacing rather than metre. As
Togashi said of his solo percussion recording, Rings (East Wind,
1976), divided into twelve parts corresponding to the months of the year
and changes in the seasons, “It’s neither a metronome nor a jazz beat.
There are more natural rhythms in the natural world”.

Soejima’s book is essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest
in free jazz and provides a gateway to not only a body of work which is at
risk of being forgotten but some of the most challenging and inventive
music the medium has produced. A great deal deserves to be better known and
there’s a danger it will be increasingly overlooked outside the low-profile
world of free jazz, and within that realm, sunk under the tsunami of new
releases. For many years the limited availability of these albums, even
within Japan, high import costs, language barriers and the self-effacing
nature of Japanese culture meant that only the most determined, and those
with deep pockets, were able to access the recordings. That has changed as
a result of the Internet. Many of the albums are available on Inconstant Sol,
due to the sterling work of Nick, Ernst Nebhuth and others. (I’m grateful
to Ernst for an illuminating exchange of emails while writing this review.)
There’s also
Different Perspectives in my Room..!
, that specialises in quality vinyl rips, and YouTube which has a good
selection of albums in acceptable sound. There are occasional new releases
and re-releases. NoBusiness recently put out An Eternal Moment, a
1995 concert from Kang Tae Hwan and his favourite percussionist, Midori
Takada, and Takayanagi’s April is the Cruellest Month has just
been released for the first time on vinyl by the Blank Forms label.

Soejima passed on 12 July 2014 at the age of 83. At his funeral a recording
was played, which he made shortly before his death: “Even standing before
the ruler of hell, I expect to act as a free man. That is what life is all
about.” Almost unheard of in Japan, the mourners applauded as one.

12
comments:

The writing is first class wearing its depth of knowledge and engagement with the subject lightly. I almost feel I don't need to read the book being reviewed yet as there is so much to digest and enjoy in these three posts

I know a good number of the albums mentioned but this is going to reinvigorate my interest in Japanese jazz and probably prove a little costly as a chase down titles new to me (I do like a physical copy, mostly)

Finally, I'd like to thank you for this paragraph which so neatly sums up how I feel when listening to this music

"Sounds are given room to breathe according to their own distinct resonances, a peculiarly sensual engagement where the subject is sonority and how it can be handled according to an internal, self-engendered logic that has regard to the power of silence as well as the clashes that can activate that space. The result is musical development that is more environmental than structural, and where sound can have the presence of colour, an almost synesthesthetic experience"

A very interesting approach, somewhere between book review and analysis of the most important albums of the era. Like MJG I feel as if I don’t have to read the book now (but I’ll try to get one even if it seems to be difficult).

When I started to dig deeper into free jazz about ten years ago I asked my friend Jochen, a real free jazz aficionado, to give me some recommendations for a basic collection of must-have-albums. I bought a lot of what he suggested but gave up on most of the Japanese stuff (the prices were too much for me). Nevertheless, I tried to get some at least in a digital version. Especially Kaoru Abe is someone I’ve fallen for (the NoBusiness was a good start, I listened to it again and again over the past three days).In the first part you’ve asked for further recommendations. Here are some:

Thank you for the kind remarks. I realise the review is much longer than normal posts on the blog, and there’s a lot to digest, but I wanted to try and give a flavour of the scene and the amazing variety of music it produced. I only cover a fraction of what’s explored in the book’s 367 pages. It’s a remarkable achievement.

If I might be permitted to take up my own suggestion, here are just a few of the many albums I wasn’t able to mention.

Keiki Midorikawa ‎– Five Pieces of Cake (Offbeat, 1975): Midorikawa plays cello and bass in a beautifully conceived set of two duos, a solo, trio and quartet in music that defies category. He also plays with Togashi and Sato on C.P.U. (Cosmic Pulsation Unit) (Denon, 1975) – the poetry of quietude.

Steve Lacy had the longest and most fertile liasion with Japan (maybe except Mal Waldron). As soloist or in diverse groups where especially Togashi has a compatible sense of space.

- Steve Lacy Sextet - The Wire (Denon, 1975) - with three bassists, Motoharu Yoshizawa, Yoshio Ikeda and Keiki Midorikawa who doubles on cello.Percussion from Masahiko Togashi and Masahiko Satoh at the piano.IMO one of Lacy's best recordings. Seriously abstract music with subtle contributions from his collaborators.

- Steve Lacy - Stalks (Columbia, 1976) - 11 days prior to the above mentioned session we have Togashi and Yoshizawa in a trio with Lacy's soprano.

Hi Colin -i think you should make a book out of your 3-part review !Long overdue account on japanese free music.I´d like to add Watazumi (Watazumido)Doso soundwise- an artist orginally from the "classical" buddhist tradition -making deep impact on artists like Steve Lacy who had some memorable studieswith Watazumido. His extended technics for hocchicu (similar to the better knownshakuhachi bamboo flute) truly sound farout having the taste of experimental music.